We'll Forget Together

Poetry by Liz Teel

It falls from my fingers, casting six rings into the night’s blue

White specks scatter over waves like rabbits darting across manicured lawns

The night falls in the valleys of the water, a bullseye fountaining as the moon dances between each drop 

My reflection stares confused at my imbalance, the jewelry I created

I cannot remember when her imbalance, her absence, her admittance of forgetting first struck my life.

I cannot remember when she started to forget.

My grandma misses my brothers eighth grade graduation, so the other brother’s 13th birthday, and my father’s 50th birthday

All three men with all three celebrations combined into one for her ease 

My mother breaks the lid to the store bought cake, the plastic splintering and snaring the skin protecting her fingernails

She calls twice and texts expecting no reply, my grandmother like everyone else’s suffers through technological advancement

Un-rubber buttons a taboo to the wrinkled thumb

The next morning her call is answered and motherly apologies drive across telephone wires.

This stone is the shape of a lost city, atlantis eroded into the palms of my hands

Outlier islands chip and stick to my fingerprints and I shake vigorously away their earth

I almost regret casting this stone with such displeasure and explosion, I should instead take it home, hammer in hand and wield away till beauty can’t be within

I have no proof, but I swear a fish succumbs to the surface, itching left and right up the depth of the river, as if scaling canyon walls to Heaven.

At Christmas, when my sister turns 14, I wrap every gift not with care but creation, arts and crafts always the fourth finger of my hobbies, not to mention as the eldest daughter

My father says I am the family gift-wrapper, born into my red sweater, black slacks

My father’s mother sits legs tight and cardigan swallowing her skeleton

She mumbles some wine and a story to my mother as my father finds a game to blur with

His father 

My mother breaks away and slips a message to her worry, my grandmother

Laying her phone on our manger of a kitchen table, the wood sings at the slightest vibration, like a drummer boy’s tenancy, yet

He did not possess the table that night.

The night grows dark enough that I seek no pleasure from watching the rippling when I throw the river’s scales within

They say as you lose one sense, the others grow

Ferocity chokes my arm and I chuck each rock so as to wake the dead, my dead

But they do not wake up, their spirit wades through the water just deep enough, far enough away for me to stop believing

I could promise again with no proof that I am a ghost’s witness, but memory cannot bloom from a lie. 

At this point I begin to cry, turning my head into my arms into the car window into the world

I was never sensitive to my own emotions, but to everyone else’s

My mother doesn’t cry when she recalls her visit, so I do it in love and servitude

At the nursing home, my mother arrived unannounced, her footsteps unrecognized as they unzip the lip of the door

My sob is not enough to quiver my lip, so I bite it, no eye should feel alone, my lip

my apprentice

Three times while they talked my grandma asked who my mother was, who were her children, if she was her daughter

Memory cannot bloom from a lie, so my mother must say no.

I work my way down the scale, starting with a rock heavy enough that I prepare my hands

After, the pushed flesh catches the light of the moon, my own hills and valleys

My final stone is smaller than my finger nail, if flattened it could paint my thumb, though I would never choose a color so empty

I dangle over the water, fingertip obstructed from fingertip by a pebble

I feel a point on each of my fingers, one edging underneath my nail and the other resting on the fold of my riverbend

I let go, and it falls in quiet.

My mother met my grandmother when six state borders weren’t enough to slice a bloodline

So, new blood had to be infused, new motherhood, daughter and love, needed to be sewn

One blood unique and the other multiplied, bouquets bundled with red twine, my grandmother’s real grandchildren grab at her khakis while I grasp at the same cuffs

They receive the same kisses from plum lips, mine from a tone more scarlet and always matching her long, circular finger nails

Proofless, but I bet her grandkids were scratched while I remained unscathed, pinched and me, pinched on the rose of my cheek

And her jewelry, louder than her voice, prettier than the stain of her kiss, she had loads, a rainbow, stones manifested from color itself, light encapsulated, like fireflies in a jar

Her favorites were bangles, oversized bracelets and statement pieces and I always loved the ones from her ears

She wouldn’t have liked the earrings I bought her, but she would have loved them anyway.

Sploosh. Hilarious, in truth and I giggle between the stones and the night 

The sound was truly a mule, the jester for the knight for the king

I cannot help but laugh, and that is the most beautiful thing

The sound of water.

Awkward, strewn from the crowd, the blood, we stand in the corner of the room, by the right wall, waiting for the space to clear

We shuffle in line, holding our fingertips, I step on my sister’s shoe and if I look up I’ll scrape my forehead on her overcoat

Compact, we view.

I’ll never remember where, but I learned that water never forgets

It births memories, a seeping blue trickle over a sea shell’s rungs, I remember that and the stain, the sand, the salt becomes one with the shell. 

Her jewelry was missing, replaced with some crappy brooch on her left breast pocket, I’ve never seen this suit before 

She was always one for pantsuits, but never for pink

She always looked best, happiest, in blue. 

Rivers carve the earth, free from hatchet, ignorant of a sculptor’s hammer and nail, their bare hands smooth mud, grass, and trees 

If the water withdraws, a barren, it will find its way again, how to live again

It can remember.

We view

Strangers, un-blood, we view our grandmother as she lies on satin cushion, clothed in the dust collection of her closet

This time my mother doesn’t need me to cry, so I do not, I am confused and forgetful

I know it wasn’t that long ago, but I say she died one day.

I zip my jacket and head for the gravel road, boot soles soaked and my hands the like 

The stones I tossed were all from the water, plucked, feathered, and resubmerged in their natural habitat

I have never taken one home, and I don’t plan to

They wouldn’t belong, even if I lied and told myself they did, memory cannot bloom from a lie.

My hands will never dry, stuck a shade of water’s blue.

I think we’ll forget together.

Yes, we’ll forget together.